I'm now entering my fifth year of time logging and keeping track of all my "life & work"-streams in an effort to make sense of my time sinks, cross-checking my aspirations & goals with reality, in the hope of tuning, re-calibrating areas to be more in harmony with my purpose / value system, sometimes triggering some decisions that could take my life-and-work in a different direction altogether. So I've become a bit of geek with the #quantifiedself so much so that I log almost everything all the time. This habit developed naturally as I spent five years consulting, needing to keep track of all my hours and tasks for billable hours. So I took this all the way into treating my entire life as one big project with multiple tasks that needed accounting!
In 2015, I spent a lot of time soul-searching to make sense of not only what I want out of my life but my work/career aspirations as well, since a major part of my life involves my occupation in the software industry. So I came up with a model called RAGE (Reality, Aspirations, Goals, Expectations). The way the model works is to split yourself into "Personas" sliced into Personal and Professional streams. Using some tools from Agile, such as user stories, you describe for each of your personas, your aspirations, reflecting on your current reality, then setting goals and expectations. Your personas are prioritised by value, which is basically an instinctive, gut-feel assessment of the value/importance of the stream, in comparison to the others. I'd created template and a matrix tool that allowed for easy prioritisation, and a template to help others on this journey as well. My hypothesis still remains valid that tracking time is one way of understanding where my time is being spent, proposing "I will naturally spend most of time dedicated to the persona streams that are of importance to me" - but the reality can sometimes be quite surprising!
In this post, I continue with my annual ritual of starting the new year by analysing what went down the previous year (2019), and how/what I would need to re-calibrate to get me on track with my life's journey-mapping into 2020:
- Recap my personal value system - persona matrix & priorities
- Snapshot of tracking my RAGE progress by milestone reviews heatmap
- Performance appraisal - Did I achieve my intended outcomes / goals set in Jan 2019?
- Quantifying every hour of 2019 - where did I spend my time, what did I do?
- Does it look like I have my life-work balance under control?
- Am I working too much, sacrificing my personal and family streams?
- Am I enjoying my current job?
- What are the main things impacting my future personal & professional aspirations?
